jmccrea

Join Date 06/2003

+21

My 1 hour game

AS most everyone was, I was super excited for the new beta, partly because i love testing, and secondly just because its making this game better. I spent the first day playing and crashing about every 15 mins or so or about 20 seasons. I had prepared myself for that and spent alot of time discussing with others the features in the chat and asking questions to Cari who Im sure thought I was crazy...especially about my seeing a female character in the game and that character automatically becoming my wife, even though I hadnt recruited her nor asked...hey im a guy...what can I say?! The crashes continued and I decided to rest the game for a bit and see how it went. 3days later, Ive come back and decided since alot of the crashes are from the multi-threading and AI doing stupid stuff(a post from Lord Frog), I thought I would just reduce the AI down to just 1. Next thing I know its an hour later and not a single crash. Course there was a strange bug when Tarth declared war on me and then sent their pioneer units across my terrority, which were killed, yet they were somehow able to keep going on!! LOL The funniest thing is that i was standing right next to Tarth's leader when she declared war, so I took her out...that might want to be looked at, at some point.

Still, this might be a way for some to play a bit longer to look for strange bugs and such. Im going to try another game and see how it goes, then steadly add more AI to see where the breaking point is. Will it work for everyone, I have no idea...just a thought that has helped my gaming...achem....testing out!

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econundrum1

Join Date 04/2007

+36

I think Fogboy as explained two bugs that are leading to a lot of stupidity by the AI.

1 - The function it uses to assess the combat rating of your unit stacks always returns zero (so it would think your territory held no threat for it's pioneers) and will also attack and defend with armies that have no chance of challanging you.

2 - The fact that Outposts have no starting population which they should have means the AI doesn't defend them (because they have zero population as well as probably making it not grow them), and is also a pain for the player when building new outpost and they effectivley cost 2 food if you want them to have any population.

I suspect once these 2 are fixed the AI will seem much better, niether sounds hard to fix.

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I agree with that and as for #2 I found out something. I founded a new city and took one over and both had 0 pop. Dropped a few huts(1 each) and a few seasons later the population took off and started growing. I wonder if the pop really isnt 0 but is rounded down or something to display 0. I was concerned but after building some huts I had populaton. There was also something in the tooltip that I think said something about a housing shortage, so maybe something is going on there. You would think a starting city wouldnt need huts, but maybe theres a bug that is fixed when you do. This has worked for me so far.

Offensive spells dont work in any of my games. I got arcane arrow and constantly get "Blocked". Other spells like Heal and Alchemy all work fine, though it seems a bit hard to generate mana. Do we get more from buildings? I have shards too, but dont seem to get any from them, and I would think they should add some to the pool like MoM did.

As for #1, as I read it over again, I see this in the game. AI is attacking my cities and my army with no chance at all. But at least its attacking haha. My other games they never would and maybe this should be reflected in the game difficulty, so that at higher lvls the AI "gets it" a lot better.

Off to try another game with 2 AI and see how it goes.

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Offensive spells work early on. Later on, particularly against other player/AI controlled units (rather than neutral units) it seems there is some crazy resistance that I cannot figure the source. I suspect that they naturally cast spell resistance enchantments on their units if going against spell casting opponents.

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Quoting jmccrea,

reply 2

Outposts do not provide additional housing, you need to build huts.

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Well so far with 1 AI I have played a 2.5 hour game...unreal. I wonder what is happening with more AI to cause the game to crash? The AI too, is not bright and is constantly at war with me even if they have a 1pt lead over me. What is funny, is their military is a joke and Im basically slaughtering them. I hope they take a look at the AI, in time of course, and makes some changes. Still, is fun to go thru all the techs and see the different stuff.

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